harriak: "palimpsest" exhibition

Opening night: Friday, October 6th at 19:00. Joint visit with the artists and the curator.

You could say that a landscape is a palimpsest made out of hundred-year-old layers encompassing memories, transformations, ideas and viewpoints. How we perceive it is the result of all the visions that end up lodged in our memory.

Landscape is not synonymous with nature. Rather, it is the product of a person's action in a society whose economy and culture transforms it and adapts to it. It is a concept involving cultural connotations and is susceptible of being read as a code of symbols which is in turn a cultural, social and political reflection of the concept's present, past and projected future. The concept of landscape is therefore ‘a way of seeing’, a constructed perspective which responds to a context and an ideology.

Most of the time we see the landscapes we want to see, those which don't question our idea of landscape: the bucolic or nostalgic idea of what it could be and what it no longer is, or of what it was or could have been.

The works by Edurne González Ibáñez, Ainhoa Akutain, Igor Rezola Iztueta and María Bocos identify the layers of the palimpsest which break down the landscape until it no longer exists. These layers of landscape perception comprise an overlapping of concepts and meanings which are a testament to the social construct we call landscape.